Sport or war? UFC on FOX 5 headliners see MMA through very different lenses

Back before the UFC was on FOX, back when it was still sandwiching events between episodes of “Manswers” and videogame award shows on Spike TV, it held a Wednesday night event at Omaha Civic Auditorium that was headlined by Nate Diaz taking on Josh Neer.

This was September of 2008, and a lot things were different.

For one, the post-fight “press conference” after this event consisted of two metal folding chairs being set up in a back room where media members had gathered over potato chips. Into those two chairs plopped Diaz, who’d just defeated Neer via split decision, and Clay Guida, who’d outpointed Mac Danzig earlier that night. This setup didn’t last long.

Diaz mumbled a couple sentences as reporters were still setting up their digital cameras. Out in the hallway, his brother, Nick, shouted for him to [forget] this [stuff] (I’m paraphrasing here), at which point Diaz abruptly got up and left. No one did much to try to stop him, and soon only Guida was left, giving us all a shrug that said, I don’t know, man, I don’t get these guys either.

That’s not necessarily to say that Guida didn’t know why Diaz didn’t want to sit next to him and answer questions. It’s just that he didn’t really understand it, much like most of the people in the room that night, because we all had a very different way of looking at the sport of MMA than Diaz did.

To Guida, it was a professional sport. It was a competition, albeit a very serious and potentially dangerous one. To Diaz it was war, which is why he didn’t want to sit there next to some guy he’d likely be at war with soon (and they did fight four months later at UFC 94, with Guida winning a split decision). He didn’t want to pretend to be friends or even just friendly. Diaz didn’t go in for that stuff, he told me later. He seemed almost stunned that anybody did, especially given the nature of their sport.

“You want to knock me out in front of my friends and my family, take my paycheck?” Diaz said. “Then we’re not going to be friends. I’m not running around being a punk or a bully, but at the same time, I’m not going to be buddied up with some guy I’m about to fight.”

Four years later, now on the precipice of a title shot on live network TV, this is still how Diaz looks at the world of professional fighting. There’s nothing sporting or sportsmanlike about it, he insisted when I spoke to him for a recent USA TODAY story. It’s two people trying to hurt each other for money, which is about as unfriendly as a competition can get. It’s “warfare,” he said, and so that’s how he treats it. The thing that still surprises him is that other fighters don’t see it that way, or at least they say they don’t.

UFC lightweight champ Benson Henderson is one of those other fighters. As he said when I asked him about the Diaz approach to MMA, fighting may be a more “intimate” activity than other sports, but, “I think of fighting as a job, as a professional sport. That’s exactly what it is: It’s a sport. It’s a competition.”

You don’t have to look too hard to see how these different philosophies translate into very different fighting styles, for better and worse.

For instance, look at Henderson. He’s the UFC lightweight champ, riding a five-fight win streak, and yet the biggest criticism of him is that he’s a little too comfortable winning by decision. He seems to focus more on winning rounds than finishing fights, and why wouldn’t he be? If this is a sport, the object is to win. And if you win the fight by winning more rounds than the other guy (assuming you don’t get knocked out or submitted, which is probably something you had better assume if you’re going to do this in the first place), Henderson’s style is the most dependable and yet least risky way to go about it.

So what if some people don’t like it? Since when do athletes in other sports allow concerns over how they win to get in the way of whether they win? In that sense, MMA fans seem to want it both ways at times. They want this to be looked at as a serious professional sport – except for when they don’t like the way someone uses the rules to their advantage.

Then you’ve got Diaz, who, when he looks at Henderson, says he sees a man who is “just doing what he’s got to do to get through the fight.” In case you haven’t noticed, the Diaz brothers don’t play that. They fight as if there is an agreement in place to stay here and battle for as long as it takes to decide this thing. They fight as if they have no idea that, after a set number of rounds, the fight will suddenly end and a winner will be declared. As a result, they look like they’re always moving toward a finish, which, from their perspective, makes sense. If you think the only way out of that cage is to make the other guy stop, why wait around for 20 minutes before you try to stop him?

That makes for a fun style to watch, but it’s not necessarily the best way to win over judges. Maybe that’s why both Diaz brothers seem to have gotten it in their heads that judges are out to screw them at every opportunity. When you think about it, it makes sense that judges and the Diaz boys would be natural enemies. The judges are a part of the apparatus that reminds us that this is a sport rather than war. Their very presence suggests a flaw in the Diaz state of mind. Of course they don’t get along.

The weird thing is, when you compare the two philosophies side by side, it’s hard to tell who has a better handle on what MMA is really about. One of the most bizarre and wonderful things about fighting is that it is sport without the metaphor. Other sports are constructs, games where people mimic the life and death struggle for territory and resources. Fighting is that struggle in the simplest possible terms. It’s the thing that happens in other sports when tempers flare and the metaphor breaks down. You never go to a baseball game and see the players get so mad at each other than they start playing basketball. Fighting is the sport that begins where diplomacy ends. If you don’t show up with some amount of hostility toward the guy who has spent the last several weeks thinking about how best to hurt you, that’s almost more disturbing.

At the same time, without the sport element of it, there are no fans, no packed arenas, no money to be made. If we had to wait around for people to get angry enough to fight each other, we’d probably end up with far fewer fights, and the Diaz brothers might have to go get regular jobs. Something tells me they’re not cut out to work in a bank, so they should be grateful for this sport, even if it’s the sporting aspect of it that seems to baffle and occasionally enrage them. Others can look at it like it’s one big wrestling tournament where everyone comes to test themselves and do their best. Diaz looks at it as a brutal, unforgiving landscape where there’s not enough food for us all to eat.

“I think that’s the way everybody looks at it, but they try to portray themselves as some great person that everyone wants them to be,” he said. “They try to be like some great role model. I think it’s fake.”

He could be right. Maybe guys such as Henderson are telling us what they think we want to hear. They might be putting on suits or playing the role of the gentleman warrior so as not to freak us out with their ability and willingness to hurt their fellow man for money. Or maybe it’s a window into Diaz’s mind that, when confronted with people who say they view the same activity differently, his first instinct is to assume they are lying.

Ultimately, it seems like both Henderson and Diaz tailor their approaches to the world they see. It just so happens that they look at the same world and see different things. Once they finally get in the cage together on Saturday night, the debate can begin in terms they both understand. We might not know for sure who was right by the time it’s all over, but at least we’ll get the bizarre pleasure of watching the argument unfold.

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